IRIS RECOGNITION

Handbook of Biometrics Chapter 4

Igor Leonardo O. Bastos igorcrexito@gmail.com

Summary

Understanding an eye
A short history about iris recognition
Current state
The Method
Off-Axis

Gaze Correction
Detecting and Excluding Eyelashes
Evaluation

References

UNDERSTANDING
AN EYE

Understanding an eye

How is called any part of an eye?

Fig 1 Eye parts and its names

A SHORT HISTORY OF
IRIS RECOGNITION

A Short History of Iris Recognition

Iris was the target of studies since the ancient Egypt,

Chaldea and ancient Greece
Stone

inscriptions, painted ceramic artifacts, writings

Commonly associated to the art of Divination

Fig 2 Symbol of protection and royal power

A Short History of Iris Recognition

Studies about iris remits to Hippocrates writings and

Imotheps

Fig 3 Hippocrates and Imhotep

A Short History of Iris Recognition

Alphonse Bertillon iris as a distinguishing human

identifier
James Doggart complexity of iris patterns and
adequacy to serve in the same way of fingerprints
(oneness)

Flom and Safir patent of Doggarts concept but no

method to make it possible

Fig 4 Alphonse Bertillon, Leonard Flom and Aran Safir

CURRENT STATE

Current State

Developed rapidly over the past 15 years

Large

number of active researchers in academy and

industry

Lots of people enrolled in iris recognition systems

Systems are usually designed for use in
identification-mode
One-to-many

exhaustive search
Astonishing number of comparisons

Current State

Basic research into alternative methods continues

Scientific and engineering literature about iris
recognition grows monthly
Contributions

from several university and industrial labs

around the world

Iris recognition systems employed by government

agencies
Project

IRIS from UK to identify immigrants

Current State

Many iris recognition datasets are available

CASIA
UPOL

Iris Database

UBIRIS
ICE

Iris Image Database (v4)

Database

2005 Database

BATH

University Iris Database

THE METHOD

The Method

Finding the Iris is the first thing to be done

Inner

and outer boundaries at pupil and sclera

Upper and lower eyelids
Superimposed eyelashes or reflections from the cornea or
eyeglasses

Precision in assigning the true inner and outer

boundaries is a critical operation
Innacuracy

can cause different mappings of the iris pattern

in its extracted description

The Method

Important point iris is not an annulus

Inner

and outer boundaries are usually not concentric

Pupil boundaries and outer iris boundaries are noncircular

Performance improved by relaxing both
assumptions
Methods

for modelling boundaries whatever their shapes

The Method

Finding the correct countours can be difficult

Eyelids

can occlude iris outer boundary

Reflections from illumination can occlude iris inner boundary
Both can be occluded by reflections from eyeglasses

It is necessary to fit flexible contours that can

tolerate interruptions
A constraint both boundaries are closed curves

The Method

Employment of Active Contours based on discrete

Fourier series expansions of the contour data
Selecting the number of frequency components
allows control over the degree of smoothness that is
imposed
Truncating

means applying a low-pass filtering over the

boundary curvature data

The Method

Snakes representing pupil and iris boundaries

Ideal

snakes would be flat and straight

Fig 5 Snakes and corresponding maps

The Method

There is a tradeoff between simplicity of the model

and its precision
Number

of terms used on the Fourier Series (M)

Empirically, the author found good approximations

for values M=17 (pupil) and M=5 (iris)

OFF-AXIS GAZE
CORRECTION

Off-Axis Gaze Correction

Model requires an on-axis image of the eye

Stop-and-stare

interface

Correcting the projective deformation on the iris

when its image is off-axis
The essence of the problem is estimating the angles
of gaze relative to the camera
Eye

morphology is so variable that is unlikely that this factor

could support a robust estimation

Off-Axis Gaze Correction

Obvious alternative approach shape of pupil

Estimating the ellipticity of the pupil and orientation
of that ellipse would yield the gaze deviation

The author proposes something different Fourierbased trigonometry

Off-Axis Gaze Correction

Fourier series expansions of the X- and Ycoordinates of the pupil contains shape distortion
information related to the deviated gaze
If the pupil boundary is a circle, this method is
reduced to the previous one
Estimating these parameters gaze deviation to
be reversed by an affine transformation of the offaxis image

Off-Axis Gaze Correction

Fig 6 Off-Axis Gaze Correction

DETECTING AND
EXCLUDING EYELASHES

Detecting and excluding eyelashes

Eyelashes can occlude parts of the eye

Usually have random and complex shapes

Can be the strongest signals in iris images, in terms

of contrast and energy

They could dominate the image with spurious information

Fig 7 Eyelashes occluding parts of the eye

Detecting and excluding eyelashes

Employment of statistical estimation methods that

depend essentially on determining whether the
distribution of iris pixels is multi-modal
If the lower tail of the iris pixel histogram supports
na hypothesis of multi-modal mixing, then an
appropriate threshold can be computed

Fig 8 Histogram and threshold computation

EVALUATION

Evaluation

Comparison between IrisCodes (bit pair Bernoulli

trials)
Areas obscured by eyelids, eyelashes or by
reflections from eyeglasses are processed and
prevented to influence the iris comparisons
IrisCodes keep the information about the phases
and are compared through bit-wise mask functions

Evaluation

Code related to each iris is ExclusiveORed and

ANDed to mask functions
Raw Hamming distance used to compared to irises:

The number of bits pairings available for

comparison is usually nearly a thousand

Evaluation

Restrictions related to the behaviour of masks

Must take into account the amount of comparison
data that was available

A normalization is performed in order to improve

the confidence level score normalization

LARGE-SCALE
APPLICATIONS

Large-Scale applications

Score distribution for 200 Billion Different Iris Comparisons

Fig 9 Hamming Distance of different irises

Large-Scale applications

Use of thresholds to compute the similarity of one iris to

another

OBRIGADO !

REFERENCES

References
1. John Daugman. Iris Recognition. In: Handbook of Biometrics,
Springer, USA (2008)
2. Enrique A. Velasco. Connections in Mathematical Analysis: The
Case of Fourier Series. In: American Mathematical Monthly,
v.99, USA (1992).

3. Michael Kass, Andrew Witkin and Demetri Terzopoulos.

Snakes: Active Countor Models. In: International Journal of
Computer Vision, p. 321-331. (1998)